Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s SONG (1995)
Edited by Shara Lessley
“Completely understood. But unspeakable”
Through the lens of a Brigit Pegeen Kelly poem, everything familiar looks strange yet finely honed. In “Garden of Flesh, Garden of Stone,” for example, a bird nestles its way into the ear of a statue where it whistles and the marble body “shivers … looks up.” As if from sepia to Technicolor, the scene then further transforms as the statue fully realizes its surroundings: the stone boy experiencing, for the first time, “the charred smell of wet dirt and the mist / that slides across the blackened branches / in strands as slow and milky as the horned snails / that come out at dusk and drag their silver trails…” Animation and pleasure, however, aren’t without consequence as the poet revises the story of Edenic loss: punishment dispensed not to Adam and Eve, as in the Book of Genesis, but to the sculpted child. If hearing the bird’s “Five slow notes” enables the sculpted boy to “taste [the] old fruit on his tongue …,” awakening in him a paradise of sensory experience, such discovery also triggers suffering. Solitary, naked, and no longer fully innocent nor completely removed from the sentient world, the stone child is doomed to witness the living as a stationary onlooker. It is the statue’s fate, Kelly attests, to “stand harmless,” while hearing human boys “behind the wall, who with rocks and shrill shouts / bring down bird after singing bird …”
When I first read Kelly’s sophomore collection nearly two and a half decades ago, what struck me most wasn’t Song’s fusion of lyric beauty and violence, Gothic-like cemeteries and grottos, or even the enterprise of layered and sometimes circular plots—although I remember, distinctly, the rush of adrenaline afforded by each of these signatures—but, rather, a curious feeling that Kelly’s linguistic potency and intonation typically signal what I think of as liturgical. “Listen:,” the first word in Song commands. And I did, reading aloud accounts of dead deer, commiserating weather, deceptive pipistrelles, allusions to St. Sebastian and St. John, and a murdered goat named “Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry.” While the parables and homilies of my Catholic upbringing arrived at clear moral pronouncements, Kelly’s oeuvre engages similar subjects—cruelty, grace, betrayal, reconciliation, disbelief, and “[o]ur own genius for harm”—while making space for nuance and ambiguity.
In “The Pear Tree,” for example, citrine is a jewel and the color of fruit, as well as the misremembered hue of a crow’s eye. It is likewise love’s promise, i.e. “The plaything of the man’s heart,” that leads to an inevitable betrayal in the form of romantic disappointment and the death of a beloved finch. As varied as its configurations are, however, citrine proves cyclical: after twenty-two quatrains that cascade in a vortex of rain, gardens (vegetable and burial), bogs, liars’ tongues, poison, and fruit, the poem’s speaker anticipates a renewal reaped from devastating loss. “… O foolish woman,” beckons the speaker as the poem nears its conclusion:
Mesmerizingly, Kelly synthesizes several key images in the final six and a half lines. This stitching of tropes feels satisfying, as resilience seemingly overpowers melancholy. “Sit … and wait. Sit … and wait,” advise the imperatives. But can grief flower into something other, as the introduction of “another pear tree” suggests? “Perhaps,” Kelly qualifies, the embedded adverb and open-ended ellipses resisting whatever resurrection her imagery insinuates. This contradiction—and the ability to hold competing tensions in wild suspense—is classic Kelly. Ground yourself for new growth, the diction assures, even as the stanza’s syntax and grammar remind readers nothing is guaranteed.
Driven by corrections, counterturns, and hypnotic repetitions, Song moves as much by “imperfect” narration as it does by linear progression and simple assertion. One of Kelly’s great gifts, in fact, is the ability to prolong her poems’ descriptive energies without exhausting their central occasion or action. Anaphora and epistrophe often aid the dizzying effect of her storytelling, as do auditory notes that lend dramatic emphasis. Here’s an early excerpt from “Song” partially marked to underscore patternmaking:
Near rhymes unspool throughout the above lines subtly threading hacked / tracks and harder / larger. The common “ck” and “ar” digraphs of these pairs link them additionally to darkness, which pulls through shared “s” and “d” sounds in headless, finished, and missed. Consonance likewise joins head, hard, hacked with imagined, struggled, finished, hide, body, and missed. As the sonic engine revs, Kelly then drives the plot forward with sentences of varying arrangement and length. “They hung the bleeding head by the school / And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything” she describes. Contrasting this elongation are the shorter, staccato units that follow: “The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks. / The head called to the body. The body to the head.” Here, Kelly’s truncated chiasmi are particularly arresting, as their staggering repetitions—head, body, head, body,—and final inversion—body, head—hauntingly enact the decapitated goat as it sings its confusion and lament.
That acts of brutalization alter the mind is no great claim. Yet even as Song makes explicit the exhilaration of threat and pursuit, Kelly’s synesthetic effects soothingly counter her renderings of danger and cruelty. Given the title’s auditory nod, it’s no surprise that the book hums, whistles, murmurs, whispers, trills, and vibrates with human voices and animal noises. But sound isn’t the only faculty at work. The visual, via color, is likewise everywhere, as are layered references to smell, taste, and touch. Sensory interplay occurs not just between diction and image, however, but also transforms abstraction, as in “The first epistolary drops / Strike sparks from the leaves, // Send up the sweet fragrance / of the Far Gone …” (“The Music Lesson”) or “I hear the crows barking. / The ocean is going. / And the trees in good faith are drinking our poison.” (“The Witnesses”) (emphasis mine). Concepts like “the Far Gone” and “good faith” reverberate elsewhere with language such as “the thin air of our unteneted world” and “this is the soul: like it or not.” As often as they narrate memorable stories, Kelly’s poems tirelessly circle complicated feelings and ideas: shame, patience, commiseration, solitude, self-inquiry. Instead of seeking doctrine-like proofs, however, Song lingers in experiences difficult or impossible to explain as transcendence and the enigmatic reside not within the imagination or otherworldly, but the world itself.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly died at 65, a few weeks shy of the contentious 2016 presidential race: her passing, like her poetry, shrouded in mystery. Although the initial news of the poet’s loss was met with an outpouring of admiration across social media, the lack of critical recognition since that time seems disconnected from her poetic achievement. Did the attention-grabbing results of the U.S. election contribute to this vacuum? Was Kelly’s own indifference to self-promotion or literary politics responsible? Whatever the case, for her linguistic reverberations, evocative menagerie, and inexhaustible grappling with uncertainty, she remains a poet’s poet. The author of just three books, Kelly possesses a distinct imaginative and intellectual virtuosity that few can claim—what Seamus Heaney describes as a necessary component of lasting influence; that is, an “out-of-stepness with the main trends [of the time].”
Winner of the James Laughlin Award (then known as the Lamont Poetry Prize), Song is as radiant and distinct as it was at the time of its initial publication in 1995. Yet, with the exception of “The Witnesses,” which gestures toward looming environmental crises, there aren’t any real signposts highlighting the cultural or political conditions in which the book was written. On the whole, Song’s contents remain devoid of archival events of the late 1980s and early 90s. Even the first-person point of view, when Kelly adopts it, seems less personal than composite—a representative perspective in which the poet is more comfortable with the inclusive “we” or “us” rather than an intimate “I.” Kelly’s hermetic temperament and fable-like staging feel tethered not to a particular era, but to the larger through-line of lyric poetry. Her engagement with the human and animal world remains as timeless as her interests in moral negotiations and neglect, and the limitations of attentiveness and self-awareness, as demonstrated in lines like “Strange about the kills we get without intending them. / Because we are pointed in the direction of something. / Because we are distracted at just the right moment, or the wrong …” (“All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer”).
West Branch is honored to appear in Song’s “Acknowledgements” section, as the magazine first published “Percival” in 1986. Now, thirty years after the collection’s initial printing by BOA Editions, it is a pleasure to bring readers the following essays by David Baker, Amit Majmudar, Gabrielle Bates, and C. Dale Young, each of whom offers critical insights on dimensions of Kelly’s work. As Majmudar observes, Kelly’s imaginings “pierce the veil of observed phenomena; they draw the reader through the scene to the unseen.” After all, while Song begins with the fusion of earthly song and storytelling, it ends in silence and the celestial as Kelly gestures toward one of lyric poetry’s most iconic symbols of contemplation, distance, and astonishment:
—Shara Lessley, Editor-at-Large
Virginia, March 2023
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Singularity
David Baker
When I travel, I take books of poems with me, always, in my carry-on, in my bookbag. Long trip or short, near or far, they are as essential as toothbrush, ID, keys. Two weeks ago it was James Longenbach’s Forever, Carl Phillips’ Scattered Snows, to the North, The Works of Anne Bradstreet, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song. The poets and books change, depending on what I’m working on or what I need in my spirit world. But I have carried Song for thirty years now, on so many trips or just across the house to the den or bedroom or kitchen.
Time is a merciless editor. All poetry will sooner or later perish, as we will. Most poetry is gone in a blink, but now and then a book of poems persists a little longer. Why Song? What about these twenty-seven poems remains primary for so many of us poets in the last thirty years since it first appeared? In some circles it is virtually the stuff of legends, like the poet herself. Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris (1992) is like this and Susan Howe’s Singularities (1990), from about the same time, and more recently a few other poetry volumes may be on track for a similar longevity. Maybe Solmaz Sharif’s Look, without a doubt To 2040 by Jorie Graham.
I heard Brigit Kelly read an early version of “Dead Doe” around 1989 or ’90. I don’t now remember where, probably at Bread Loaf, maybe at Denison. But I do remember going up to her right after the reading to ask about that poem, to wonder if she might let me look at it for The Kenyon Review where I was Poetry Editor. She wanted, she said, to work on it and then she’d send it to me. And she did, a couple of months later. I recall vividly my excitement and sense of providence. She continued to revise a few more small things—an image, a phrase—and “Dead Doe” appeared in KR in 1991 and in Song four years later. Brigit and I remained friends—mostly in correspondence though we met a few more times in person—until her death in 2016. I have letters. Remember those?
There’s not a slack or tepid poem in Song. But since it provided my first sense of the magnitude of this book, I’ll say more about “Dead Doe.” It stands with the title poem as the best examples of Brigit’s brilliant, unmistakable vision. That said, “Dead Doe” is in its narrative a simple poem. The speaker is waiting with her young son at the school bus stop, and she sees something in the autumn landscape, where a “doe lay dead on her back in a field of asters.” Perhaps it was killed by a passing car, perhaps a hunter, and through a series of reiterations—alternating “no” and “yes” with many of her observations—the speaker performs a series of dazzling acts of seeing and reseeing. That is, of revision.
Her revisions of this single scene dramatize her various impulses—to get the scene right, to protect the innocence of her son, to change her own mind, to articulate her incredulity, to reach for meaning and “presence” in a moment of simple shock. In doing so, the poem becomes breathtaking in its beautiful reactions to the deer’s sacrifice: “she lent / her deadness to the morning, that the morning might have weight, that / our waiting might matter: be upheld by significance …” Even this short phrase dramatizes Kelly’s strategy to find a syntax, phrasing, music, and formal design appropriate to her hesitations at the shocking fact of the deer’s body.
After a lengthy series of short and long lines, fractured phrasing, and further abrupt halts by colons (“but: no: not done: can’t be”), Kelly lands, at the poem’s midpoint, on a single short primary clause: “the doe lay dead,” following by the poem’s most significant transformation: “she could / do nothing: // the dead can mother nothing …” The female deer is in her dying no longer maternal, and this moment of explicit affiliation and difference marks the poem’s depth of grief. The magic—and it is a poem about magic as much as a poem that feels like magic—is in the seeing, in the treatment of that simple narrative. Its transformative enactment is further developed in the final sixteen lines of poem, where the carcass turns into something else altogether:
From here an even more fabular description carries the poem into its most soulful final moment, as “we watch her soul fly on: paired / as the soul always is: with itself: / with others.” Kelly issues her concluding couplet in the poem’s most simple syntax and its most complex revelation: “Child. We are done for / in the most remarkable ways.”
“Dead Doe” makes me catch my breath every time. I’m as incredulous, and then as believing, as the speaker. But why, and how? The poem is built on a very familiar narrative, virtually a poetry cliché. That is, a common scene finds its detail in a natural setting where the poet is merely an observer, passive if intensely focused. Nature provides our instruction, our lesson, and an animal is sacrificed for our human edification. It’s certainly the same cliché as in another familiar deer poem, Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,” or Jeffers’ even more unrelenting “Hurt Hawks,” where the speaker would “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” We look at nature in its beauty and its pain. An animal loses its life while we gain a moral takeaway.
Ten years after Song’s publication, Timothy Clark in The Poetics of Singularity tackles the problem of the lyric cliché with vigor. He looks to both Hans-Georg Gadamer’s and Michael Riffatterre’s “close readings of literary texts … to show how various tropes and images of the text can be understood as … transformations of commonplaces from literary traditions.” Clark says, “for Gadamer, it is not so much a matter of decoding the poems but of making a unique hermeneutic struggle visible …” This is what Clark, borrowing from cosmology and physics, sees as a lyric singularity. The poem becomes “not something one can simply think, but something that has to be let think, in its own way, within a space one tries to hold open.” My point is precisely that this is what Kelly seeks to achieve in “Dead Doe.” The dramatic tension between her own observation and her own disbelief creates a singular authenticity, and many of the poem’s formal tactics—its hesitations, fractured lines, and self-revising syntax—show how she revises and “lets think” her own narrative. The poem is less descriptive, then, than rhetorically dramatic, and the potential cliché of the narrative is kept wholly at bay by the singularity of the speaker’s acts of witnessing and discovery within her struggle for articulation.
Isn’t this the secret as well of the book’s majestic first poem, the title poem, “Song”? From its opening commandment—“Listen”—repeating Beowulf’s triggering “Hwaet,” to the hardly veiled tragos allusion of the “goat’s head,” “Song” affiliates so directly with both Greek and Anglo-Saxon mythology it’s hard to imagine how it might succeed on its own as a contemporary telling of a small community’s collective pain. Where “Dead Doe” requires our meticulous looking and relooking, here we must listen. That is, we are asked to listen; but given the haunted narrative as it develops, our listening to the goat-head’s singing is like the guilt-heavy, compulsory listening of “some boys [who] / Had hacked its head off.” This song haunts the boys. In fact, the song haunts the whole community. The young girl who owned the goat suffers its loss deeply; as she wept, even as she slept, she “called to him.” Her sorrow is so great that the community tries to shield her from the grisly discovery, days later, of the goat’s headless body, “the flies already filling their soft bottles / at the goat’s torn neck.” The boys suffer, too; the retributive punishment meted out to them is that “the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,” endlessly reenacting the result of their cruelty, in essence, calling them out. In another final transformative sweep, as in “Dead Doe,” here the song becomes each boy’s “mother’s call, / Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all.” But rather, in dramatic paradox, “This song / Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.” And I am stricken once more by the authenticity and accomplishment of Brigit Kelly’s artistry.
The telling of “Song” is powerful, this time from the point of view of a third-person narrator, presumably a community member. And its formal design differs from “Dead Doe” in many ways—here, a single very long stanza, of very long lines of roughly equal length. The poem’s hesitations and syntactic interventions, however, are equally as vivid as those in “Dead Doe.” Kelly plays off the long line with very short clauses and phrases, a movement as artfully methodical as in the deer poem. Through the whole of Song, Kelly maintains this thrilling device, her rhetorical and formal hesitation-and-release, matching each poem’s distinct tactics with its equally distinct narrative. Kelly braids the omnipresence of animals—not just a deer, a goat, but birds, cows, fish, many more—with human narratives of personhood, family, and community that reach into the depths of both disbelief and faith, devotion and transformation. And in so many occasions, in many of these poems, what might devolve into mere commonplace or lyric cliché, as Clark calls it, is revivified into utter originality, into its narrative “singularity,” by Kelly’s magic and virtuosic idiom and style. Poem after poem in Song achieves this degree of accomplishment and originality of vision.
There remain for me only a couple of further questions. Song, and in its way The Orchard (2004), is a masterpiece of contemporary lyric poetry. Then why do so many younger poets not seem to know it? Why has no one published a collection of all of this major poet’s work in a collected or complete volume? Besides “Iskandariya,” are there other Kelly poems, subsequent to The Orchard, that really ought to be so preserved?
Brigit Pegeen Kelly writes of the mysteries. These last questions remain mysteries to me as well.
The Storyteller: On Kelly’s Song
Amit Majmudar
What differentiates the poem from the short story? The short story from the parable, the parable from the anecdote? These aren’t matters of word count or lineation, meter or dialogue. It comes down to a question of feel, a term that literary criticism, with its pretensions to “analysis,” has never been comfortable with. But one thing that struck me about Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s second volume, Song, is how often her singing takes the form of storytelling. As it did, of course, with the earliest poetry in the world—what else was Gilgamesh; what else was the Ramayana but song-stories, story-songs? Some believe Homer stitched together his epics from ballad-like narrative songs circulating in live performance.
Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
That is the gambit that will bring a hush to the gathering around the campfire. The title poem’s first line is as gripping as the opening line of any great novel, any epic; its “listen” is equivalent to the Hwaet that opens Beowulf. But it captivates the attention by its mysterious, mystical, almost sinister quality, never specified but resonating vaguely with animal sacrifice, Baphomet, lynching …. You have to read on to see where she is going to go with it.
That brings up a question of constructing a volume that I haven’t been able to resolve. Is it wise to put the title poem, the strongest poem, up front? Does it lead the reader to demand that the poet tell it again, as it were, achieve the same effect? Kelly ranges widely in the volume, from a short-lined poem about a music lesson to a poem that is vivid extended description of wild turkeys. Fortunately, she never leaves her narrative gifts to idle for very long. The narrative approach and natural world combine again, with a similar thrill of evasive meaning, in “Three Cows and the Moon” toward the end of the book:
It is hard not to contrast this 1995 volume with the poetry getting written thirty years later. Song is the work of that rare poet whose connection to the natural world was at once earthy and ethereal. This paradoxical awareness of animal consciousness is fundamentally primitive, though I don’t mean unsophisticated or simple by that—I mean literally primitive, at or before the origins of cities and complex societies. The ancient attitude of indigenous hunters toward prey—we know of tribes whose songs apologized to their own kills, beseeching them to return and allow themselves to be killed again—points toward this connectedness. Likewise the coalescence of the beastly and the divine—so alien to monotheistic thought, but commonplace throughout indigenous civilizations.
Those wild turkeys, for example. The full title of that poem is “Wild Turkeys: The Dignity of the Damned.” The line “One great variegated and his harem of four wild hens” continues into an elaborate description, at first, of turkeys. The poet sees them as the embodiment of shame at first, with the first half of the poem repeating the word three times. The description complicates itself, with a simile, to the conflation of the turkeys and the “damned,” signaled in the title.
And now, by a sleight of hand, the turkeys deepen into something beyond themselves, something not of this world but the world beneath the world. But the ungainly, “weak-winged” turkeys gain a paradoxical dignity the more the poet observes them,
Waddling and hopping in spite of their hopelessness, they merge, through (trans)figurative language, with pilgrims entering a grotto, presumably a sacred grotto that will heal them. This strikes me as illustrating the third throughline of Song: storytelling based in the natural world that deepens into religious significance, sometimes into allegory or direct symbolism, sometimes into imagery and gestures that remain ambiguous—generative, in either case.
It may be that the enigmatic poet connects herself to the “Lady of Improbable Thought”, whose image resides in the first “grotto” mentioned in the book.
Those lines may be Kelly’s ars poetica. The language that evades our complete knowing, the allegorical or symbolic background (“the scene behind the scene”), and the way that these propel the narrative action of her poems, that storytelling itself the meaning-making exercise.
This may be what makes Song feel so completely a book of poetry, in spite of its occasional overlaps with the rhythm and usual function of prose. The fictive element is subordinate to the linguistic and symbolic elements: that is, Kelly tells us stories not for their own sake but for the sake of what they occlude. They pierce the veil of observed phenomena; they draw the reader through the scene to the unseen. That is the ultimate aim of poems—and, within the arts of storytelling, of parables, which is why so many religious teachers use them. Kelly’s profound parable-poems of the natural and supernatural world have aged better than most writing contemporary with it, fiction and poetry alike. For readers who long for poems that do not take their cues from the news cycle, and for practicing poets who wish to learn new (that is, ancient but forgotten) approaches to writing poems, Kelly’s Song will reward a listen.
The Verberating World
Gabrielle Bates
:
On the worn-soft pink sleeve of my hardcover copy of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s debut, To the Place of Trumpets, published seven years before Song, there is a short piece of prose, in which she reflects on her creative process. While I get the sense that the author, incredibly private, later regretted even this small divulgence, I think it illuminates a meaningful aspect of the poetics she deepened and honed afterward: “[B]ecause sound is related to nurturance for me (the primary emotional and intellectual nurturance of my childhood came from hearing literature read aloud), it is finally with the music of poetry that I am most concerned. When I write I am trying quite simply, as my father did before me, to sing.”
I think of Brigit Pegeen Kelly as a poet of the depths. She plumbs with echoes the luminous and numinous dark of a primal unconscious. In her poems, animals re-enter the imagination as they entered human minds originally as messengers of meaning[1]: real and unreal, tactile and symbolic. In Song, sensuous existence is insisted upon—through repetition, through active description—and yet language, consistently, is the beast that gives it birth: proverbs and idioms (“a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” “kill two birds with one stone”) and etymologies (“goat song” as the Greek root of “tragedy”) hover palpably. Birds, deer, and domesticated animals leap to tactility from abstraction or towards symbolism from concreteness, living and dying in the threshold.
Like the bats she describes in the poem “Pipistrelles,” Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song “live[s] by echoes … Negotiate[s] by echoes.” Repetitions of words, full and near rhymes, repeating and mutating claims reverberate within the individual poems and across their membranes, conjuring an uneasy, multi-sensory cohesion. I’m reminded, when I consider Song, of how sound waves are used in a variety of disciplines (e.g. oceanography, internal medicine, materials testing[2]) as a way to see in the dark: in Kelly’s poems, as in other domains, when it comes to what our eyes can’t reach, echoes intercede, bouncing off the surface of the unreachable to create its image.
: :
I heard a poem from Song before I saw it. Night, cross-legged on a professor’s living room carpet, someone offered to read “Dead Doe.” I experienced then, for the first of what would become countless times, the strange cascade of yeses and nos, the “polygraph” dialogic mode that modulates the rush and swerve of that much-beloved poem, beginning:
Entering this poem, I feel it like a vortex every time. I can attribute its pull in part to a combination of its variable line lengths and visually erratic indentations, the “yes / no” affirmations and corrections, and the repetitions of words and phrases close together, which cross like birds and their shadows, in and out of the lines. If we look closer at the repeated units of language in the poem’s opening, “The doe lay dead on her back… The doe lay dead on her back… Where we waited… Where we waited… where we waited… a distance… a distance… we kept… we kept…” we see the length of the repeated units gradually shortens, creating a narrowing echo effect like a funnel. Because the speaker makes an assertion or a description and then reflects back on it almost immediately, saying “yes” or “no,” before returning to the scene, the poem zigzags like a mind alive and alert, honing in, with the heat of a real chase, attempting to pinpoint.
Repetition is imagistic throughout Song as well as sonic and rhetorical. In “Dead Doe,” each time Kelly returns to the central, titular image, she alters how we visualize it, forging surreal transformations. Metaphors (“white as a cut pear”), hypotheticals (“if she chose / to go skyward”), and mis-perceptions or visions (“for a moment no deer / at all / but two swans…”) infuse the dead, “still” subject with aliveness and surprise. With the introduction of the swans, the animal’s image is changed most dramatically from singular to double, from hooved and dead to winged and alive; it’s described as being violent, then amorous, then violent again: “they were fighting / or they were coupling / or they were stabbing the ground for some prize …” The speaker’s uncertainty in this moment, presented as a series of possible actions, creates a new, dynamic specificity. We see the swans fighting, then we see them coupling, then we see their beaks scrabbling at the ground: a quick progression of motions that together conjure the vivid “ghostly blossoming … unstoppable blossoming” born of the speaker’s looking.
I find “Dead Doe” to be a poem in which even the smallest, most unsung aspects of language yield meaningful reverberations. There is a noticeable proliferation of colons, for example, a punctuation mark Kelly makes ample use of in two other poems (“Field Song” and “Cry of the Jay”), but which otherwise appears only sparingly in Song. If the emdash—solid, linear—is a plank, the colon is a portal: the shortest possible chute. In ancient Greek, the term kôlon meant “limb” or fragment of a body, which feels resonant in light of Song’s obsession, thematically, with violent schisms and severances. Hovering behind Kelly’s usages, I also feel the colon’s affiliation with time telling (between the hours and the minutes), Bible citations (between the chapter and the verse), and its historic use as an intermediary duration of silence[3].
Another notable use of punctuation in “Dead Doe” occurs at the halfway point, when the “we” pronoun splits for the first time in the poem, particularizing into the intimate familial duo of “me” (adult parent) and “you” (child):
This is Kelly’s first and only use of slashes in the book, a typographical anomaly that highlights the jarring schism she describes. Visually, a slash is an unbroken barrier—it’s more severe, in its demarcation, than a colon would be. Even its name, slash, carries with it more violent connotations. By maintaining space on either side of the slash, the poet doesn’t just separate the words, but holds them at a distance from each other. Form and content mirror here, as the speaker grapples with the separation—physical and metaphysical—of mother and child.
The concept of a violent severance between two entities is a recurring obsession in Song, prefigured by the unforgettable opening poem, in which head is separated from body and the heart travels from one to the other to breach the gap. In a later poem, “Of Ancient Origins and War,” the heart itself is divided “into two: the heart and its shadow.” And later still, with insistent italicization, Kelly complicates (collapses?) that division, saying “the heart, friend, / Is a shadow.” Throughout the book there are many of these divisions and transformations regarding heart, soul, body, mind, sight, shadow, and sound, and a related obsession with the enduring voice of ruined originals: a statue destroyed by a madman’s hammer, which continues to laugh (22); a pet goat killed by boys, which goes on singing (16); a killed finch, which causes the woman who smothered it to flap her arms and “call in the dark,” as if possessed by the bird’s own spirit (69). “The Fall” in Abrahamic mythologies, wherein human beings were cast out from the garden of Eden and separated from God—henceforth in need of a sacrificial intermediary—haunts Song as one original schism that begets manifold others:
Core to any echo is the notion that some version of what is delivered comes back to the deliverer. In roughly the same shape, the original word bounces back, off a surface: What one sends out into the world returns. While this is, in its most basic form, merely an indifferent process of physics, in the world of Song, the phenomenon also carries a moral warning, a lesson about casual human cruelty and what it sets into motion, how it re-sounds unstoppably, action and consequence. Haunting.
: : :
While the poems “Song” and “Dead Doe” are typical, thematically, of the collection as a whole, I’ve always considered both stylistic outliers. “Song,” the titular poem, which opens the collection, is a bit of a bait and switch, aesthetically. The poem tells a story, offering a clear series of events; its sentences, grammatically, are simple. While the poem’s lines are by no means devoid of sonic pleasure or sensuousness, compared to many of the poems that follow, “Song” seems to privilege narrative clarity over luxurious echoes of rhyme and sound-driven associative leaps. Never again in the book will we be on such sure footing. In “Dead Doe,” the deviation has more to do with form: Kelly’s approach to line length becomes much more scattered, and the spatial arrangement of text on the page follows no neat stanzaic blueprint. The stylistic deviations we see in “Song” and “Dead Doe” underscore some of Kelly’s more standard aesthetic approaches and feel like important ruptures, poems in which, perhaps, the poet has surrendered more than usual to “the destructiveness of the subject,”[4] that spirit which, if it comes and we let it, lays glorious waste to authorial inclination or intention, in service of a poem’s becoming.
: : : :
Over the years I have read Song in all seasons, but mostly I have entered it again in winter, when the spell it casts can be—I find—most lush, filling the deciduous world’s evacuated space and quieter skies with its dense thickets of music, haunting oracular voices, vivid and metaphorical birds. Song is a book that seems not to suspend time so much as to honor time’s palpable spiral; the poems enthrall us with something like a centrifugal force, alive to the overlapping presences of past, present, and future experience. And thus, to reread a book like Song is to participate in its very poetics. With each return, we journey deeper into the poet’s project, adding layers in all directions: we co-create the verberating world.
[1] John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking.
[2] Echo sounding is used to create visual maps of the ocean floor, image fetuses in utero, and detect invisible flaws in steel, among many other processes.
[3] (between the shorter pause of the comma and the longer pause of the period); The Arte of English Poesie, 1589.
[4] Quote by Donald Justice as relayed by Jorie Graham on the podcast Between the Covers.
An Exquisite Balance
C. Dale Young
In the Autumn of 1993, mere months after finishing my graduate work toward my MFA degree, and barely two months into my medical studies, I stole away on a Sunday because I needed a break from memorizing anatomical details. With a friend in tow, we went straight for the literary magazine section at the bookstore, something far more common then than now. I was cynical the way one can be early in one’s writing life. I knew something about poems, but not nearly as much as I thought I did. I joked that it would be nice to read a poem that actually did something, that moved me. I picked up a copy of The Southern Review, ready to read a poem and pronounce it garbage, but when I opened the issue, the poem I opened to was “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, a poet who at that time was utterly unknown to me. The poem opened: “Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.” I stood there and read the entire poem and felt myself break out in goose bumps. I was speechless. I read it again and announced to my friend I was gobsmacked. Not only had I read a poem that moved me, I felt I was utterly changed.
“Song” opens in a rather peculiar way. It may not be as easy to spot because it is so mild, but the first sentence opens with an imperative. It commands to take notice, even if the command is the gentle and seductive “Listen.” I have wondered about and interrogated these lines for years. Why was I not immediately turned off by the outrageousness of what was being presented? Slowly what revealed itself as I studied this opening was syntax. There is a reason the unbelievable seems believable. Each sentence after that initial imperative one is simple declarative in structure. It is a basic sentence structure, one so simple it is used quite often in children’s books. I have played with these sentences and tried delaying the subject and verb, and each time I do, the lines become more melodramatic. It is the simple declarative sentence and the early deployment of the subject and predicate that make the bizarre situation being recounted seem far less bizarre (“It hung” “those felt” “they sat up” “they lay back down” “the head swayed” “it shone” “some boys had hacked” “it was harder”). In many ways, Kelly’s decision to satisfy our need to resolve subject and predicate quickly via the simple declarative sentence allows us to quickly read through more disturbing and unbelievable details and images. There is, therefore, a balance between the simplicity of the syntax and the violent and disturbing imagery being conveyed.
I am often told “Song” is a narrative poem that recounts how some boys killed a girl’s pet goat, but I have to disagree. Are their narrative elements within the poem? Yes, definitely. But I would argue the narrative elements are handled quite securely within the framework of the lyric poem. It begins with that imperative calling us to attention, which prizes the situational relationship between speaker and reader far more than one would expect in a simple narrative. The poem relies heavily on repetition and sonic effects we typically assign to lyric. Look at these lines describing what happened when the goat’s head was discovered:
We get the anaphora of “They hurried” and even the repetition of the word “joke.” The poem is far too concerned with cadence to be strictly narrative, even if it relays narrative information. Again, there is balance here, not just between simple syntax and violent imagery but between narrative and lyric modes. In a classic narrative poem, the temporality of details and events are pivotal. In “Song,” there is an erasure of time. It feels almost timeless. And unlike a basic narrative that concludes in a way that brings us resolution, “Song” does not. The poem ends with these lines:
Even at its conclusion, there is no resolution, no final judgment. Nuance lives more easily within the lyric poem. It is precisely the sweetness of this ending that makes the poem so memorable. It is why, even after three decades, I still read this poem and find it so moving. It does not resolve. The boys’ punishment is memory, memory of an event captured for us within the poem. It opens up and, in many ways, this is far more terrifying. In the end, this poem is a masterpiece of balance: between what is said and how it is said; between narrative and lyric impulses to convey information. Ultimately, the poem espouses the belief that judgment, despite being so appealing to human beings, is often left to Time and the gods. One could easily argue this poem is in many ways a primer for how to read most of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s corpus. Balance, an exquisite balance: I still get goose bumps reading it.
David Baker is author or editor of twenty books, including Whale Fall (poems, Norton, 2022), Show Me Your Environment (essays, Michigan, 2014), and I Walked to the Water (poems, Norton, forthcoming). He lives in Granville, Ohio.
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator whose work appears widely. He lives with his wife and three children in Westerville, Ohio, where he works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist. More information is available at www.amitmajmudar.com.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times Book Review critics pick, NPR Best Book of 2023, and finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Poetry. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle.
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His latest collection of poems is Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems, published in early 2025 by Four Way Books. He lives in San Francisco.